Monday, 6 January 2014

Ever since we reviewed the Britax B-Agile 3 I've been thoroughly impressed with Britax. I feel like they are at the forefront of innovation and safety when it comes to travel products for children. Not only are their products safety conscious they are also design conscious. I didn't think twice about accepting the Britax Kidfix XP SICT Car Seat and as Noah was getting too big for his car seat the timing was good. Now I know that you'll all think hold on a minute, Noah is only 2 years old and typically this seat is for 4 - 12 year olds/ children who weigh 15 - 36kg but he is the size, and weight at 19kg of a lot of 4 year olds! Big boy I know! So he fits perfectly in this seat and it isn't any the less safe for him being younger, it is the child's weight that you should consider most when changing up to new Group 2/3 car seats.

It's a forward facing seat and comes in black fabric and has washable covers - which is a good thing when your kids like to snack on longer journeys! But far more important than what it looks like is how it performs and this is where I was really impressed.

It has advanced side impact cushion technology (SICT) which helps to protect children in the event of a side on collision. On each side of the seat there are two round white disks that you can unscrew. You unscrew the disk closest to the window in order to give more side impact protection. Then the other nifty thing is the XP chest pad that diverts 30% more crash energy away from the child's chest compared to a normal seatbelt.

The seat uses our car's ISOFIX connections so it means that the seat is fixed firmly in place and doesn't slip about (unlike Isla's seat that we really need to replace!). The seat uses the existing back seat belt in the car, so no more 5 point harness for Noah (see my point about that below). Everything is geared towards total safety and touch wood we never have a serious accident but if we do I know this seat will keep Noah the safest possible.

One thing I will mention, just for the purposes of people who have rather large 2 year olds like I do - mentally they don't quite understand the need to not 'pop' the seat belt, which they are able to do when they use the back seat belts that come with the car. This happened on a couple of occasions. For us this actually happened when Noah was having a tantrum and this was always before we'd started the journey. My way to deal with it was simply to let him finish the tantrum (imagine a bucking bronco in the back of the car), calm down (him and me) and then belt up and get on the way. Thankfully tantrums are few and far between now and he understands the need to be belted up - "I won't undo my seatbelt Mummy" said on many occasions when getting in the car!